Jason Reynolds author page

Jason Reynolds biography

Jason Reynolds is an American writer of books for children and young adults. His books include When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys, As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series, Long Way Down, Look Both Ways, Stamped, Stuntboy, in the Meantime, Ain’t Burned All the Bright and My Name Is Jason.

Reynolds co-wrote All American Boys with Brendan Kiely, and the book received a Coretta Scott King Author Honor and the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature. The Track series includes Ghost, Patina, Sunny, Lu and Coach; Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Long Way Down received Newbery, Printz and Coretta Scott King Honors, and the UK edition was published by Faber on 2 January 2018. Look Both Ways is subtitled A Tale Told in Ten Blocks and won the UK Carnegie Medal.

Reynolds was the 2020–2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Twenty-Four Seconds from Now received the Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Ain’t Burned All the Bright, illustrated by Jason Griffin, received a Caldecott Honor.

Jason Reynolds teaching resources

• Jason Reynolds’ official contact page gives school and library visit request information, including the named Simon & Schuster contact for appearance requests, plus separate publicity and rights contacts.
• The Library of Congress Write. Right. Rite. page hosts Jason Reynolds’ short video writing-prompt series, with episode titles, dates, running times and prompts such as creating an award, writing a fictional tattoo, responding to art, inventing synonyms and writing a story through dialogue.
• Simon & Schuster’s Long Way Down page provides an extract, a reading group guide with discussion questions on verse form, character, structure, gun violence and revenge, plus downloadable Grab the Mic: Tell Your Story educator guides for middle-school and high-school students.
• Simon & Schuster’s Look Both Ways page provides an extract, a reading group guide, twenty discussion questions and extension activities including mapping the neighbourhood, writing from an object viewpoint, empathy analysis, short-story writing and classmate interviews.
• The Carnegies Long Way Down shadowing resource is a 17-page PDF with talking points, human-rights discussion prompts, before-reading tasks, during-reading journal focuses, after-reading activities, a Diamond 9 task, a lift-structure grid, poetry analysis and literary-analysis cards.
• The Carnegies Look Both Ways KS2 notes for teachers and librarians is a six-page PDF for classroom or home use, with block-by-block comprehension and inference questions, writing tasks and extra activities linked to each story.